100 Days of IndieWeb Challenge

For the next 100 days, I am committing to ship something related to the IndieWeb each day. A "ship" could be anything that is seen publicly or could be used by someone else that pertains to the IndieWeb. For example, if I make a change to my personal website that other people can see, that would count. If I write a blog post about something related to the IndieWeb, that too would count. Changes could be made over multiple days, but I should write a short post summarizing what I did on a given day to hold myself accountable.

I have wanted to do a challenge like this for a while but I never committed. After seeing Tantek start his year by committing to write 100 posts about the IndieWeb, I thought I would follow suit.

After watching more people sign up to Mastodon last year, my conviction in the importance of alternative, decentralized social communication media on the web has only grown. I am seeing more and deeper explorations into ways in which we can communicate like we would on a social network but without the need for a central party. The IndieWeb advocates for a web-centric approach, where we leverage the building blocks of the existing web as well as a few new ones to build tools that make communication and publishing on the web easier.

Fundamentally, the internet does not have to be controlled by walled gardens. You can publish content on your own website and share that content with friends. You can even send likes to people's websites and receive likes on your site, too, using a tool called Webmention. For me, participating in the IndieWeb is partly my belief in the importance of owning your own data but also the opportunities that affords. In this challenge, one thing I want to explore is personal highlights, and how I could easily highlight quotes on a feed on my blog. I can design everything how I would like. The more we build and share, the more tools we give others to use to express themselves online.

Today marks day one of the challenge, and my inagural "ship" shall be this post as it is getting later in the day. Tomorrow I'm hoping to ship something related to my recently-published highlight.js extension. I wonder if I could use webaction handlers to create a button that says "Publish" and it would publish a quote to my website. That shall be an exploration for tomorrow!

Tagged in IndieWeb, 100 days of IndieWeb.